September 28, 2017 7:26am EDTSeptember 27, 2017 3:43pm EDTRick Pitino had ample opportunity to go out on his own terms at Louisville basketball. Instead, he chose to exhibit the same apathetic habits that got him in trouble time and again.Rick Pitino(Getty Images)

On a late July day seven years ago, Rick Pitino sat in a courtroom on a witness stand. We’ve all seen this sort of circumstance so many times on TV and in movies that it seems familiar — and yet it is a relatively uncommon experience: If you wind up sitting in a chair with a judge over your shoulder and fielding questions from attorneys representing the complainant and defendant, it’s quite possible something has not gone well in your life.

This certainly was true for the Louisville basketball coach as he gave testimony in the case against Karen Sypher, who’d been accused of attempting to blackmail him regarding an affair in which they’d engaged in 2003. The news of this circumstance had become public in the summer of 2009, and it was extraordinarily embarrassing for someone with Pitino’s fame.

The University of Louisville supported Pitino after he issued an apology, and he remained in his position. In choosing to continue in that role, Pitino had an opportunity to rewrite his personal history over however many years remained of his career.

Instead, it seems, he chose to burn the book. Or, perhaps more accurately, he allowed the book to burn.

In his testimony, there was a moment that became a microcosm of how the remainder of his Louisville tenure would unfold: “There was one motive from the day all this started,” Pitino said, “and that was to blackmail me.”

This is who Pitino became in his final eight years as the Cardinals' head coach, right up until he was placed on unpaid administrative leave: the oblivious victim.

Oblivious to the risks of recruiting forward Chane Behanan and guard Chris Jones, each of whom he was later compelled to dismiss from the program. Oblivious to the alleged activities of staff member Andre McGee, who — according to the book "Breaking Cardinal Rules" — arranged parties involving exotic dancing and prostitution in the basketball program’s on-campus dormitory. Oblivious to the activities of Coach-1, whom a federal indictment claimed was in a Las Vegas hotel room in July, discussing the arrangement of payments to a high school prospect who wouldn’t become available to the Cardinals for two more years.

“These allegations come as a complete shock to me,” Pitino said in a statement released Tuesday. That was after that federal indictment against an Adidas executive and four others also declared a Louisville coach was complicit in the presentation of a $100,000 payment to someone associated with McDonald’s All-American Brian Bowen to secure his commitment to the Cardinals.

Pitino already is in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame after having reached Final Fours at Providence, Kentucky and Louisville.

“I came home last night and said, once again, to my wife: 'You can’t make this up,'” U of L board chair J. David Grissom said at a news conference Wednesday. “So it was a terrible disappointment. I really felt like we were on the trajectory that was positive and could take the university to the next level … I’m disappointed. A little bit of anger. It’s not a happy day for the university.”

Athletic director Tom Jurich already had begun to reinvent the Louisville athletic department when he helped engineer, at considerable financial cost, the retirement of legendary Cardinals coach Denny Crum as his effectiveness waned by the 2000-01 season. With Pitino available following his dismissal months earlier by the NBA's Boston Celtics, Jurich persuaded Pitino to come “home” to Kentucky rather than accept the vacant Michigan job.

The program was successful in Pitino’s first several years, including a trip to the 2005 Final Four and another to the Elite Eight in 2009. Then the Sypher business hit the media, and it never was quite the same in the Ville.

It should have been better, though. It should have been pristine — above reproach. Because that ought to have been the priority after what had transpired. This is a coach who was once such a workaholic, his assistants had to be ready for 5:30 a.m. pickup games. At best, one can postulate, Pitino began to miss on the details that go into operating a program the way it ought to be run.

It is easy enough to look at the multiple schools that had assistant coaches indicted by the U.S. Attorney on Tuesday, and others whose programs were dragged into those 100-some pages of ignominy, and assume there is only one avenue to success: But there are college teams that win a lot without engaging in anything so untoward.

Pitino was able to get 25 wins and a No. 3 seed in 2011 out of a team whose star player, Preston Knowles, was offered scholarships by Marshall, Morehead State, Western Kentucky and Miami. (No, the other Miami). He was so gifted as a developer and organizer of talent, it’s possible only Bob Knight and Larry Brown were his superiors in those departments through the history of the game. He could have won his way to retirement on a series of players just like Preston Knowles.

Would Pitino have won a national championship without Behanan, whom he suspended one game in the fall of 2012 and indefinitely in September 2013 before cutting him loose a month after that? Almost certainly not. Behanan’s offensive rebounding was the singular difference between the Cardinals and Wolverines in the 2013 NCAA Championship game.

Pitino had choices to make about how his career would end after he’d been embarrassed by the revelations about his affair, and particularly the details. His path to retirement should have been clear. There were plenty of excellent examples for him to follow along that course. Whoever might have victimized Pitino over the course of the past decade, he chose not to exercise the proper control over his final chapters.